Bizarre Weather

I don’t know if others have noticed but there seems to be a lot of strange weather patterns of recent years and it seems to be getting more frequent. I am creating this thread as a kind of catalogue and discussion page for this. If you have noticed anything unusual along these lines, in your neck of the woods, I’d like to hear it.
Recently in Australia we had the Black Saturday Bushfires in 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires
Since then we have had the Queensland floods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Queensland_floods
A bunch of Cyclones have also hit. In mid Spring just a couple of months ago we had snow, this is strange because it barely snows here in winter. Today, the trigger for the reason I post this thread, here where I live in Sydney it reached a temperature of 46 degrees Celcius (which is about 115 degrees Farenheit) the hottest day on record.

@trek79, i’m from chicago but was there only for a month this winter, but for that month it was in the 50s for a lot of the time in January… very unusual since its usually in like the 20s or below at that time of the year. Also practically no snowfall, feel like the winters have gotten warmer last few years in Chicagoland.

We had a heatwave all across Australia last week, culminating in a Cyclone of Western Australia, that heatwave broke, so we thought, then out of the blue we get today.@happiness222, I have been hearing strange things about the U.S that you guys will have massive snow falls. Also there is the Hurricane in N.Y which I find odd considering Hurricanes are tropical and N.Y is very temperate, but apparently it is rare but it has happened.

Past 2 years it has snowed in october here in new jersey, destroying a lot of trees that still had their leaves. To my memory it has not dropped below 15 degrees Fahrenheit this winter, which is pretty unusual. It has also been recorded by BBC that 2012 is in the top 10 of warmest years since they began recording the weather around the 1880s.

I know talking about the weather is the biggest cliché smalltalk topic ever, I’m a bit ashamed of myself for that, but I never really took notice of the weather before. Do you think that it may be just suggestion of the media (and environmental lobbying), about climate change and global warming, that is causing us to notice these little oddities? I haven’t lived long enough to really judge if this is just a typical cycle or if there is more to it.
But generally the science is out on climate change, marked increses in global temperatures can be directly compared to greenhouse gas emmissions, they rise and fall together, mostly rise. It is extremely hard to believe they do not correlate.
A main thing that scientists predict is “more extreme weather patterns” and this is not just in heat and heat related phenomena like Hurricanes/Cyclones, but also in the opposite extreme. Snow, for example, relies heavily on moisture in the air, so the more heat the more moisture the more snow. Then there is how when ice melts it releases cold energy into the air, something happening on a massive scale in the polar regions.